Amazon launches Elastic MapReduce service for easy crunching

Another morning, another projects involving Hadoop and the cloud. This time, Amazon's the proprietor, announcing the beta launch on Thursday of their Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which the blog post describes as "a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data." It is, in other words, the numbers-crunching capability without the cluster setup and management. Prices are lower, too, starting out at $.015/hour. For now, the service is available in the US only.